Clouds over climate study
Survey researcher and academic John Krosnick recently wrote an article for the New York Times called The Climate Majority, in which he describes a poll he conducted on community attitudes to climate change.
Contrary to other polls, he found massive support for climate mitigation policies in the US, even if other countries don’t follow suit.
Now, let’s ignore the fact that the umbrella institution for this study is the Woods Institute for the Environment, which, judging by their website, already has a position on global warming and whether we should take action. Let’s just pass right by that one, and assume the poll was done in good faith.
Here’s question 12:
You may have heard about the idea that the world’s temperature may have been going up slowly over the past 100 years. What is your personal opinion on this – do you think this has probably been happening, or do you think it probably has not been happening?
So far, so good. They got about one quarter of respondents saying that it had not been happening. That’s pretty hard core skepticism, since most skeptics in the sciences agree it’s at least happening. But anyway, then comes Question 14.
(Assuming it’s happening) Do you think a rise in the world’s temperature is being (would be) caused mostly by things people do, mostly by natural causes, or about equally by things people do and by natural causes?
The way this question works is if you don’t believe in warming, you get the words in brackets. In other words, if you said, nope the planet is not warming at all, then they would ask you “assume it is happening,…”
Okay. does anybody else see the problem with this?
Allow me to use an example to illustrate. Let’s say we’re doing a survey on whether the world was created in 7 days, as described in Genesis.
Surveyer: “Do you believe the world was created in seven days by God, as described in the book of Genesis?”
Me: “No.”
Surveyer: “Assuming it was, do you think that God intended for Adam to bite the apple, or did not intend for Adam to bite the apple?”
Me: “WTF? I don’t want to answer your stupid questions any more.”
Come on. “Assuming it was?” they might as well have said, “we’re greenies, just humor us for the rest of the survey please.”
After being invited to play along, it’s not clear that respondents would know when to stop.
As it turned out, they got
“Things people do” 30 %
“Natural causes” 25 %
“Both equally” 45 %
In my experience – you can consider this to be “qualitative evidence” if you like – when people say “both equally” they’re really expressing skepticism, but are either being polite, or are too unsure of their knowledge of the issue to come out with a strong stance. It’s a token gesture toward the scientists, so as to not hurt their feelings. They’re hedging their bets.
If those numbers split evenly down that 75/25 split from question 12, that leaves about 22 percent of the population are hard-core global warming believers. Hardly a huge majority.
But really, by this time, the jig is up. The survey is clearly about global warming and whether people care enough to do anything about it. There’s a slight problem with this and that is that Global Warming is touted as a moral issue. Some have described it as “the greatest moral issue of our time.”
Here’s the irony.
Krosnick himself is an expert on biases in surveys, and has published papers that show that when one particular stance is socially desirable (like being good, or being green, or caring about planet Earth, perhaps) people are likely to put on a good face even to an anonymous telephone surveyor.
Global warming seems like a prime candidate for such a social desirability bias. In which case, his survey possibly over-estimates the level of support for global warming mitigation policies. Maybe it’s a lot less than 22 percent.